[ckan-dev] Docker

Tue Oct 6 14:20:42 UTC 2015

On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 9:16 AM, Matthew Fullerton
<matt.fullerton at gmail.com> wrote:
> There's been a bit of noise on GitHub recently about CKAN docker deployment.
> Currently there are four methods that an innocent newcomer might expect to
> work, assuming they find them all:
>
> - Follow the docs (use Docker Hub images) -> doesn't work, and can't easily
> work because of problems Docker Compose solves (approach 3, see below)
> - Use the Dockerfile in the main GitHub repository (not a complete solution,
> i.e. doesn't work)
> - Use the ckan/ckan-docker repository -> doesn't work, but could be easily
> fixed (https://github.com/ckan/ckan/issues/2255#issuecomment-145025193)
> - Use datacats (https://github.com/datacats/datacats) -> I haven't tried
> this yet (still burned from approach #1), but it sounds promising
>
> I don't think the CKAN community has the resources to sustain 3+ approaches,
> and yet Docker is a brilliant tool for a project like CKAN with multiple
> components. Would it be possible to unify support for one of these, fix it
> (if necessary), and update the docs? If #3 is for some reason better than
> #4, I'm willing to help fix and document it. All traces of #1 and #2 should
> be removed, IMO (happy to make docs changes/pull requests to that effect
> too).

I work on datacats so that's the approach I know the most about.

Currently we're generating our own ckan images to use with datacats. I
would prefer to be using official docker ckan images, and it's on my
list to get those updated and working again. It should be possible for
someone to get a ckan site up and running in the "normal" docker way
really easily, and then consider moving to ckan-docker or datacats as
they need more advanced functionality. Until then you're right, the
instructions in the docs and the Dockerfile in the repo should be
removed.

datacats helps with managing development of ckan sites including
tracking all the installed extensions and configuration, and running
multiple differently configured ckan sites and databases on one
machine for development. datacats lets you keep all your source code,
configuration and data on your local disk in predictable locations
instead of hidden away in a docker volume. It also wraps a set of the
common things we need to do with ckan into a single command line
interface.

Ian